Turning Up the Volume on AIDS; Agency's Shock Tactics Bring Results, and Criticism

By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: November 1, 1999

In a warehouse basement with low ceilings and exposed, wheezing pipes that made it the perfect place to plot subversion, the leaders of Housing Works mapped out the group's next act of civil disobedience. Seated around a square conference table, smiling at the delight of playing naughty, they set the ambush for a Friday in November and timed it to disrupt Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's weekly cabinet meeting.

Agility, not size, is imperative to the success of the operation, said Charles King, a grizzled veteran of civil disobedience who is one of the two executive directors of Housing Works. He and a small strike force of two dozen people would rush through the lobby of a certain city agency, into the elevators and up to the executive offices. Then they would handcuff themselves to desks and doorknobs before the guards could catch up.

That city agency was chosen, Mr. King said, because of a new policy that could cut welfare benefits to recipients who use drugs -- a sizable portion of the clients of Housing Works, an AIDS service organization. And he gave a reporter access to the weekly strategy meeting on the condition that the name of the agency not be disclosed. ''There has to be an element of surprise,'' he said.

''I'm sure there are legal or legislative efforts that we could pursue,'' suggested Mr. King, another playfully devious smile emerging from his salt-and-pepper beard. ''The other way is to do something a little more radical.''

Radical advocacy -- blocking bridges, breaking up government news conferences, crashing celebrity birthday parties and having protesters chain themselves to the desks of high-level government officials -- is what Housing Works does like no other social service agency in New York. It is a strategy that also makes the agency some enemies.

The group was founded in 1990 as an offshoot of Act Up, and carries on its tradition of explosive and emotionally wrenching demonstrations that have helped push the AIDS epidemic into the American consciousness and often shamed the government to action.

The agency has become one of the city's largest AIDS service providers, with a budget of about $19 million and more than 2,000 clients, and it has won several important legal battles against Mayor Giuliani.

Most recently, the state's highest court ruled on Oct. 19 that the Giuliani administration had created illegal obstacles to public assistance for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. The State Court of Appeals ordered the city to stop requiring people with H.I.V. or AIDS to submit to rigorous screening procedures routinely imposed on other applicants.

Despite the group's success at more sophisticated forms of advocacy, Housing Works, inspired by an eclectic and irreverent band of leaders, never moves too far from its roots.

The principal leaders -- a Yale-educated Baptist minister who was shunned by his family when he disclosed his homosexuality, and a social worker who has H.I.V. -- say they relate to their clients because at one time they were their clients: poor, powerless outcasts. And, they believe that often, the only way to make their voices heard is by making their voices heard.

In a protest against proposed cuts to welfare in April 1995, the group organized 250 people to block rush-hour traffic in the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown Tunnels and on the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. At President Clinton's 1996 birthday party in Radio City Music Hall, 16 handcuff-linked protesters jumped on stage and began chanting against the welfare bill the president had recently signed.

''Part of the reason that we're players at all is because we can force the dialogue,'' said Keith Cylar, the other executive director of the agency. ''It's not because of our money. It's because we are not afraid of a fight. We are not afraid to do whatever we need to do to take care of our people.''

Critics, however, say that Housing Works is not above turning public advocacy into personal attacks, even against allies in the government and nonprofit agencies that provide similar services. And critics said that rather than allowing the kind of open debate that Housing Works wants from Mr. Giuliani, the agency sometimes engages in the same uncompromising, repressive tactics it attributes to the mayor.

Nancy Wackstein, the director of the Office of Homelessness under Mayor David N. Dinkins, recalled what happened to her when she described in a public forum the city's policy of putting homeless people with H.I.V. in city shelters instead of in separate housing. When she got home that night, she said, there were posters of her plastered on her Upper West Side block that labeled her an AIDS criminal, a tactic that a Housing Works leader acknowledged the group has used.

''I still have a visceral reaction when anyone mentions the name Housing Works,'' bristled Ms. Wackstein, who is now executive director of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a private charity. ''It was the personal nature of the attacks that bothered me.''

''Sometimes that kind of thing works,'' she added, ''but more often than not, it backfires because you lose people who were or could have been allies.''